In vane, in vain, in vein
Commentary
These texts deal with the vanity of life. Jeremiah lived in a time when the world, as he
knew it, was coming apart. While it was clear, in no uncertain terms, that things in his
world would not remain as they were, it was very unclear as to how, when, or if things
would stabilize at some point. In a sense, he lived as a vane, pointing in the clear
direction of the coming judgment of Judah that will blow in from the north. He also had
no problem pointing in the direction of a broken cultic and national moral life as the
cause of the judgment that is surely to come.
In many ways, the prophet would understand the mood of our times. From whatever point one comes on the political and theological compass, there seems to be near unanimity that we live in times like Jeremiah's when bills have come due for the way we have lived. However, there seems be somewhat less consensus around either from which direction the judgment shall come or what might be the communal failings that have lead to the denouement of this hour. Some would locate the judgment to a failure to maintain traditional moral codes and mores. Some have even spoken of the 9/11 tragedy as the first installment on the coming judgment. Others say an ill wind has blown in from a corrupt use of religion to prop up national and political ambitions. Many point to the unfolding events in the Middle East as a historic unfolding of a master plan that goes back to Jeremiah's time and beyond. Some are ready to give a clarion call to action in the face of the coming crises; others say hold on to your hats for the ride.
One thing is certain, the vane is pointing toward a coming hurricane. One of the difficulties of our time, unlike the clear conviction of Jeremiah, is that there is little agreement as to the direction from which the storm is coming. Although there seems to be more common ground among people of faith, a good deal of the source of our future troubles lies in the direction of global warming and energy shortages. It seems that we are better able to call for repentance around these issues than the rest of the potential crises that we are facing.
The text points to the common denominators that can help us live through the impending accounting whatever direction it may come from. Most of us find ourselves watching some wind vane to see which way things are blowing -- no matter from whatever direction we are coming.
In the vein of whether our faith has been in vain, Paul calls into question whether we can follow a Jesus who is merely a moral exemplar, wisdom teacher, healer, worker of miracles, or therapist extraordinaire. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with those things, only that they are not the only things as far as Paul is concerned. Paul makes clear that we cannot come together without coming to some sense of the life to come. He even states that there are profoundly serious consequences in this life if we cannot come to a mature understanding of the life to come in Christ Jesus: "If Christ has not been raised from the dead then your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." I am not too sure that I am comfortable with the notion that an inability to believe leaves me in sin with consequences for this life or the next. How much of the resurrection tale must one believe in to get beyond vanity? Indeed, some people who cannot make hide nor hair of the resurrection story, live lives that are anything but vain. Others who cannot get past the vanity of believing that they will be going to heaven by their own virtue, swallow the story, hook, line, and sinker.
The gospel text exposes one of the rich veins of Christian faith. It asks us to consider what we believe is the wellspring of a fortunate blessed life and what we really believe is a life of woe. Of course, we might want to generalize and say blessed are you when you are willing to have your entire world stood on its head, or how fortunate you are when you are willing to have the conventional notions of life confounded. This is the kind of thing that can give religion a bad name in some quarters. One might find grounds here to question the psychological health of the speaker. This text, for some of us, may have hit a nerve rather than a rich vein.
We are asked in these texts to consider whether we have found a wind vane pointing us on course to a rich vein or are we living in vain?
Jeremiah 17:5-10
As Jeremiah surveys the scene of impending doom he finds those who place their total trust in human works courting complete disaster. Of course, the source of impending doom for Jeremiah is spiritual viciousness that has been made worse by the exposure to foreign ways and cults. At its heart is trust in human technology, nimbleness of mind, and cleverness of soul to see people through the impending disaster. We might want to say of our time that no advance in technology will spare us the fundamental coming to terms with too many having too little and too few having too much of the world's resources. Put another way, cursed are you who cannot ask for your daily bread or who do not even know what your daily bread is. If we are trusting in the free market to answer this question as some are, then we may be in for the rude awakening that it alone cannot help us navigate the future. We may be watching which way the weather vane is blowing, but we watch in vain if we cannot come to some consensus on this matter.
One may be so bold to say that Jeremiah is right in one sense -- that our relationship to faith communities that have not been traditionally part of the American experience has brought us some grief. However, in Jeremiah's day, the answer was separation from foreign gods and nature cults. I suspect that the weather vane might be pointing a few degrees in another direction these days. It may not be our separation so much as our comprehension of the world's spiritual traditions that will enable us to build alliances with others; that will help us face our problems in the coming days.
America, having been a Judeo-Christian nation in its self-understanding, now must work out its destiny in a context far different from Jeremiah's situation. Jeremiah understood relief as coming in a single-minded devotion to the Lord. We are more likely to be blindsided by our inability to find common ground and mutual understanding in light of our various traditions.
Certainly, Jeremiah describes those who, trusting in their own strength, live in an uninhabitable wasteland. Certainly, those who point out we might be headed that way are described as rendering a Jeremiad over our times. On the one hand, Jeremiah would seem to be the least appealing of the prophets to Americans. We rely on a native optimism and a can-do spirit to see us through. On the other hand, it seems the vision of the parched uninhabitable land has been held out in recent years, whether of the nuclear kind, the environmental variety, or the theological apocalyptic version.
The text suggests that the answer for those who most successfully negotiate, the coming judgment will be an adequate root system. "They shall be like a tree planted by water sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes." A few years ago in the Boston area there was a bank that advertised that where others had branches it had roots. They were making the point that this large mega-financial institution was not just a presence or player in the neighborhood, but took root in the community. The inference was that this was an operation that really knew the people, customs, hopes, and fears where they were doing business. Whether or not it was true, the idea certainly had appeal in the many neighborhoods of Boston. If roots are the answer, then Americans may find themselves facing the heat with a disadvantage. It strikes me that native aboriginal people with deep roots in the land have been the first to perceive global warming. The text raises the question of whether we will be sufficiently rooted in enough shared common ground among the world's many peoples to build a viable future together. Will we be sufficiently rooted in our own tradition to withstand an ill wind from whatever direction it may blow?
Jeremiah says that God searches the human heart and finds its deviousness. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the word for this deviousness is the root of the name, Jacob. Like Jacob we will have to do some wrestling with God before things will be straightened out.
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
If Christ is not raised from the dead then we are living in vain in more than one sense of the word. If Christ is not raised from the dead then we must engage in a vain attempt to somehow play down, limit, or ignore what is at the heart of the Christian testament. The birth narratives are written from the perspective that the powers that be cannot crush the one who has come as a child. The witness of scripture here is not that we have a moral example, great teacher, insightful sole, but a resurrected Savior.
Yes, give it to the Romans; their power to kill was off the charts. However, what is at issue here is that their capacity to bury was quite a bit less. Empires seem to routinely come up against their inability to completely bury truth, visions, or their own sordid past. As Gandhi put it, in the end all the dictators are swept away.
Of course, if Christ is not raised from the dead then we live in vain, as in vanity. We are then on our own. There will be no surprises. We are left to our own resources to roll away the heaviness of life.
This is not what the message of Easter is or how I experience life. I enter life's tough moments and difficult times in hope because I never know how God might use them to bring glory to God and blessing to me. I know it is not my strength that rolls away the heavy stone in my life. In vain, I try to make it budge; then a friend visits, and I find myself considering the birds of the air or the lilies of the field; a failure turns into a friendship. The stone, too heavy for me to move, God rolls away with a gentle shove. This seems to me to come to reflect the Easter pattern.
In vain, I try to provide closure for people over the reality of the loss of a loved one. Indeed, I can even slip into vanity as I search for ways to brilliantly preach closure. But it seems, like at the first Easter, God is in the business of making an opening in our lives as we work our way through grief and loss. In the midst of the loss, people can find themselves resurrected to new life. This seems much closer to my experience than the tale told in vain by those who say that there is no resurrection.
The resurrection of the body invites me to get with my body. God has invested in it and seeks to save it as a part of me. It seems that I live in vain when I ignore God's investment and try to override what the body was meant to be. This is closer to the resurrection story of Easter morning than the vain tale told by those who try to work their body to death or see it as only an object of their own glorification rather than a reflection of God's glory.
Harry Emerson Fosdick once preached a sermon about doubting your doubts. I find myself doubting the doubting when I realize that often what stands between me and being fully alive is my failure to realize that the death of my ego often proceeds being fully alive. The letting go of past hostilities and old grudges must proceed before I can receive new life.
Of course, there will always be those who say Christ is not raised. It seems to be a reality that is beyond human comprehension. However, I find myself doubting the doubter when they begin to tell a tale that vainly tries to rule out the resurrection as part of the Christian witness.
Luke 6:17-26
There is no doubt here that we have a confounding, transfiguring counter-intuitive understanding of what is the blessed, fortunate, "going places" sort of life. Whether we take the revised version Matthew offers us or Luke's version, there is no real mitigation in the tension between these words and the way that we live for the most part.
As these words from the gospel run through me over the years, I find myself more and more accepting of their truths. The older I get the more I realize that having more to live on than live for is not the way to go. Approaching retirement, the skill of acquiring and managing things seems much less important than being open to what lies ahead. Emotional honesty and authenticity seems a much greater gift than being able to camouflage the self that is in service to driving ambitions. At this point in life sorting through what one has found to be nonnegotiable is a greater gift than being able to fudge, spin, or distort in service of the career track of a false self. Jesus does seem to definitely be on to something here.
How come I still get hooked by the measurement of my life that says that the blessings in my life come from being self-sufficient and independent. What is my problem? When it comes to matters of the heart, cardiologists have some insights to offer us. I think that I have a vein problem. The problem is that the body has not built a way around the blockage in my life. Sometimes, the body is actually able to do this. Other times, it needs some help. What old rivalries, unfulfilled ambitions, or bad family history have I not dealt with that I need to either come to terms with or get around? Sometimes, the problem can only be addressed by placing a stent at a particularly vulnerable spot. I know Jesus is right here, yet around certain people I am vulnerable. Folks who bear a particular strong resemblance to those who put me down in high school are surefire candidates to give me a spiritual coronary occlusion.
Sometimes, the answer is a change in diet that will mean consuming what is less likely to clog me up and more likely to open me up to what Jesus understood to be the fortunate life. Approaching retirement, I find that years of a steady diet of our culture have left me measuring myself by productivity, career track, and "bigger is better" even when I must downsize. I look forward to sharing my hard-earned wisdom with others when perhaps what I need to consider is that God may have more in store for me in the learning department. I suspect that a change of diet may be required here if I am to receive the blessings that God has for me in the years to come.
The most radical and invasive procedure to address heart issues is bypass surgery. This involves the transplantation of healthy veins from some area in the body to the heart. Woe to you who are rich, you may require hospitalization and your chest cut open. Blessed are you when your body is well enough that it builds a network around the problem. Blessed are you when you have found the vulnerable place and a stent can be in inserted to help you at the vulnerable place. Blessed are you when they can deal with this through monitoring and disciplining your diet. Woe to you when you have let things go so far that you require invasive surgery.
Application
The consideration of these texts brings us to the close of the season of Epiphany. Next week, the liturgical calendar will sweep us into the events of the Transfiguration. The three texts for this Sunday invite me to that place where I experience the revelation of God, concerning how I live my life. Lord knows that our society has invested all sorts of effort in trying to discern which way the wind is blowing. Any casual user of the internet or viewer of television or listener to the radio, cannot finish the day without being aware of the latest economic indicators, the most recent poll results, or what is hot and what is not.
Jeremiah calls us to consider how we discern which way the wind is blowing. I have a sneaking suspicion that our methods of discernment may be seriously flawed. I look back over the last few years and wonder who among us has been able to adequately predict where we as a nation and a planet have found ourselves. Jeremiah clearly ran into some problems as the result of his discernment, and the message he preached. Given the failure of many of our methods of discernment, maybe we should pay attention to what Jeremiah is saying and what weather vane he uses.
It is very interesting that from the very first there were those in the early church who set aside or minimized the meaning of the resurrection. This suggests to me that human difficulty with the resurrection predates the enlightenment and it rationalism. No doubt there may be many understandings of what the resurrection can mean. Paul, I believe, is saying to us that if I cannot say that Jesus is raised and know what I mean by that, my faith is in vain.
The well-being of my soul has much to do with whether the veins to my heart are clear and functioning. As the years go by, I have come to terms with Jesus' counter-cultural and counter-intuitive preaching. As the years pass, I must consider what is blocking me from acting on what I know to be true.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 17:5-10. There is much in these texts that bother me. I don't like Jeremiah saying, "Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals." I am extremely uncomfortable with Paul implying I am still in my sins if I cannot join in the full-throated chorus of those who can say that Christ has been raised from the dead. Should this be viewed from the problem of sin or just of intellects that have been dimmed by the hyper- rationalism of our age? I wish that Luke had just used Matthew's approach of "all blessing -- no woes" in Jesus' words.
However, these texts do not invite me to minimize the tension but to live in its midst. For all our obsessing about the signs of the times we may have missed the most important if we cannot read Jeremiah adequately. We do not like it, but our inability to come to terms with the resurrection may indeed have left us in a dead-end world. I may not like Jesus' words in Luke but without coming to terms with what is really a blest life, I am left in a sea of woes.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 1
This psalm could have been written yesterday! It is striking in its contemporaneous feel. Think about it. Today the airwaves are full of those who would offer advice. From familiar newspaper advice columns to the proliferation of so-called professionals who offer advice on everything from dating to careers to investing and back again, everyone wants to get in on the act. Moreover, the media and its corporate handlers offer the seductive sinner's path to anyone who is willing to take the hike. Violence is chic, infidelity is standard, and religion is a joke. The "scoffer's seat" is held up as an ideal place to be in this day of cynical derision and near universal lack of trust. It is a desolate and joyless landscape, indeed.
Thus it is that this psalm offers a way out. Those who refuse the addled advice of commerce driven talking heads are more likely to find happiness. Those who resist the manifold temptations to walk the paths that sinners tread, similarly have access to happiness.
And the scoffers? How can there be joy in the process of tearing down others? How can there be happiness in positioning oneself as an adversary to anything and everyone that comes along with a new idea or a creative option? Cynicism may be trendy, but it is devoid of happiness except for a sneering kind of schadenfreude that is best left on the shelf next to the latest tabloid.
Real happiness comes in the clarity that emerges from a community of faith that is rooted in God. Like a tree next to a river, such a people do not thirst or grow weary. Instead, as nourished and connected people, they grow and flourish in the ways of trust, hope, and new beginnings.
Creating such communities within our churches is one of the most critical callings of the church today. In a world of vaunted and narcissistic individualism, the caring voice of community beckons. In a time when noble and good efforts are ridiculed as silly and useless in the so-called "real world," the idealism of Christian community stands as an island in the storm. And, in the midst of a runaway, consumerist culture where feelings and instincts are numbed by the ever-present pressure to acquire more and more, God's yearning reaches out to awaken us.
Yes, indeed. This psalm could have been written yesterday. Perhaps, today a new psalm might emerge celebrating the joy of those who have staked their claim in loving, authentic Christian community.
In many ways, the prophet would understand the mood of our times. From whatever point one comes on the political and theological compass, there seems to be near unanimity that we live in times like Jeremiah's when bills have come due for the way we have lived. However, there seems be somewhat less consensus around either from which direction the judgment shall come or what might be the communal failings that have lead to the denouement of this hour. Some would locate the judgment to a failure to maintain traditional moral codes and mores. Some have even spoken of the 9/11 tragedy as the first installment on the coming judgment. Others say an ill wind has blown in from a corrupt use of religion to prop up national and political ambitions. Many point to the unfolding events in the Middle East as a historic unfolding of a master plan that goes back to Jeremiah's time and beyond. Some are ready to give a clarion call to action in the face of the coming crises; others say hold on to your hats for the ride.
One thing is certain, the vane is pointing toward a coming hurricane. One of the difficulties of our time, unlike the clear conviction of Jeremiah, is that there is little agreement as to the direction from which the storm is coming. Although there seems to be more common ground among people of faith, a good deal of the source of our future troubles lies in the direction of global warming and energy shortages. It seems that we are better able to call for repentance around these issues than the rest of the potential crises that we are facing.
The text points to the common denominators that can help us live through the impending accounting whatever direction it may come from. Most of us find ourselves watching some wind vane to see which way things are blowing -- no matter from whatever direction we are coming.
In the vein of whether our faith has been in vain, Paul calls into question whether we can follow a Jesus who is merely a moral exemplar, wisdom teacher, healer, worker of miracles, or therapist extraordinaire. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with those things, only that they are not the only things as far as Paul is concerned. Paul makes clear that we cannot come together without coming to some sense of the life to come. He even states that there are profoundly serious consequences in this life if we cannot come to a mature understanding of the life to come in Christ Jesus: "If Christ has not been raised from the dead then your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." I am not too sure that I am comfortable with the notion that an inability to believe leaves me in sin with consequences for this life or the next. How much of the resurrection tale must one believe in to get beyond vanity? Indeed, some people who cannot make hide nor hair of the resurrection story, live lives that are anything but vain. Others who cannot get past the vanity of believing that they will be going to heaven by their own virtue, swallow the story, hook, line, and sinker.
The gospel text exposes one of the rich veins of Christian faith. It asks us to consider what we believe is the wellspring of a fortunate blessed life and what we really believe is a life of woe. Of course, we might want to generalize and say blessed are you when you are willing to have your entire world stood on its head, or how fortunate you are when you are willing to have the conventional notions of life confounded. This is the kind of thing that can give religion a bad name in some quarters. One might find grounds here to question the psychological health of the speaker. This text, for some of us, may have hit a nerve rather than a rich vein.
We are asked in these texts to consider whether we have found a wind vane pointing us on course to a rich vein or are we living in vain?
Jeremiah 17:5-10
As Jeremiah surveys the scene of impending doom he finds those who place their total trust in human works courting complete disaster. Of course, the source of impending doom for Jeremiah is spiritual viciousness that has been made worse by the exposure to foreign ways and cults. At its heart is trust in human technology, nimbleness of mind, and cleverness of soul to see people through the impending disaster. We might want to say of our time that no advance in technology will spare us the fundamental coming to terms with too many having too little and too few having too much of the world's resources. Put another way, cursed are you who cannot ask for your daily bread or who do not even know what your daily bread is. If we are trusting in the free market to answer this question as some are, then we may be in for the rude awakening that it alone cannot help us navigate the future. We may be watching which way the weather vane is blowing, but we watch in vain if we cannot come to some consensus on this matter.
One may be so bold to say that Jeremiah is right in one sense -- that our relationship to faith communities that have not been traditionally part of the American experience has brought us some grief. However, in Jeremiah's day, the answer was separation from foreign gods and nature cults. I suspect that the weather vane might be pointing a few degrees in another direction these days. It may not be our separation so much as our comprehension of the world's spiritual traditions that will enable us to build alliances with others; that will help us face our problems in the coming days.
America, having been a Judeo-Christian nation in its self-understanding, now must work out its destiny in a context far different from Jeremiah's situation. Jeremiah understood relief as coming in a single-minded devotion to the Lord. We are more likely to be blindsided by our inability to find common ground and mutual understanding in light of our various traditions.
Certainly, Jeremiah describes those who, trusting in their own strength, live in an uninhabitable wasteland. Certainly, those who point out we might be headed that way are described as rendering a Jeremiad over our times. On the one hand, Jeremiah would seem to be the least appealing of the prophets to Americans. We rely on a native optimism and a can-do spirit to see us through. On the other hand, it seems the vision of the parched uninhabitable land has been held out in recent years, whether of the nuclear kind, the environmental variety, or the theological apocalyptic version.
The text suggests that the answer for those who most successfully negotiate, the coming judgment will be an adequate root system. "They shall be like a tree planted by water sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes." A few years ago in the Boston area there was a bank that advertised that where others had branches it had roots. They were making the point that this large mega-financial institution was not just a presence or player in the neighborhood, but took root in the community. The inference was that this was an operation that really knew the people, customs, hopes, and fears where they were doing business. Whether or not it was true, the idea certainly had appeal in the many neighborhoods of Boston. If roots are the answer, then Americans may find themselves facing the heat with a disadvantage. It strikes me that native aboriginal people with deep roots in the land have been the first to perceive global warming. The text raises the question of whether we will be sufficiently rooted in enough shared common ground among the world's many peoples to build a viable future together. Will we be sufficiently rooted in our own tradition to withstand an ill wind from whatever direction it may blow?
Jeremiah says that God searches the human heart and finds its deviousness. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the word for this deviousness is the root of the name, Jacob. Like Jacob we will have to do some wrestling with God before things will be straightened out.
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
If Christ is not raised from the dead then we are living in vain in more than one sense of the word. If Christ is not raised from the dead then we must engage in a vain attempt to somehow play down, limit, or ignore what is at the heart of the Christian testament. The birth narratives are written from the perspective that the powers that be cannot crush the one who has come as a child. The witness of scripture here is not that we have a moral example, great teacher, insightful sole, but a resurrected Savior.
Yes, give it to the Romans; their power to kill was off the charts. However, what is at issue here is that their capacity to bury was quite a bit less. Empires seem to routinely come up against their inability to completely bury truth, visions, or their own sordid past. As Gandhi put it, in the end all the dictators are swept away.
Of course, if Christ is not raised from the dead then we live in vain, as in vanity. We are then on our own. There will be no surprises. We are left to our own resources to roll away the heaviness of life.
This is not what the message of Easter is or how I experience life. I enter life's tough moments and difficult times in hope because I never know how God might use them to bring glory to God and blessing to me. I know it is not my strength that rolls away the heavy stone in my life. In vain, I try to make it budge; then a friend visits, and I find myself considering the birds of the air or the lilies of the field; a failure turns into a friendship. The stone, too heavy for me to move, God rolls away with a gentle shove. This seems to me to come to reflect the Easter pattern.
In vain, I try to provide closure for people over the reality of the loss of a loved one. Indeed, I can even slip into vanity as I search for ways to brilliantly preach closure. But it seems, like at the first Easter, God is in the business of making an opening in our lives as we work our way through grief and loss. In the midst of the loss, people can find themselves resurrected to new life. This seems much closer to my experience than the tale told in vain by those who say that there is no resurrection.
The resurrection of the body invites me to get with my body. God has invested in it and seeks to save it as a part of me. It seems that I live in vain when I ignore God's investment and try to override what the body was meant to be. This is closer to the resurrection story of Easter morning than the vain tale told by those who try to work their body to death or see it as only an object of their own glorification rather than a reflection of God's glory.
Harry Emerson Fosdick once preached a sermon about doubting your doubts. I find myself doubting the doubting when I realize that often what stands between me and being fully alive is my failure to realize that the death of my ego often proceeds being fully alive. The letting go of past hostilities and old grudges must proceed before I can receive new life.
Of course, there will always be those who say Christ is not raised. It seems to be a reality that is beyond human comprehension. However, I find myself doubting the doubter when they begin to tell a tale that vainly tries to rule out the resurrection as part of the Christian witness.
Luke 6:17-26
There is no doubt here that we have a confounding, transfiguring counter-intuitive understanding of what is the blessed, fortunate, "going places" sort of life. Whether we take the revised version Matthew offers us or Luke's version, there is no real mitigation in the tension between these words and the way that we live for the most part.
As these words from the gospel run through me over the years, I find myself more and more accepting of their truths. The older I get the more I realize that having more to live on than live for is not the way to go. Approaching retirement, the skill of acquiring and managing things seems much less important than being open to what lies ahead. Emotional honesty and authenticity seems a much greater gift than being able to camouflage the self that is in service to driving ambitions. At this point in life sorting through what one has found to be nonnegotiable is a greater gift than being able to fudge, spin, or distort in service of the career track of a false self. Jesus does seem to definitely be on to something here.
How come I still get hooked by the measurement of my life that says that the blessings in my life come from being self-sufficient and independent. What is my problem? When it comes to matters of the heart, cardiologists have some insights to offer us. I think that I have a vein problem. The problem is that the body has not built a way around the blockage in my life. Sometimes, the body is actually able to do this. Other times, it needs some help. What old rivalries, unfulfilled ambitions, or bad family history have I not dealt with that I need to either come to terms with or get around? Sometimes, the problem can only be addressed by placing a stent at a particularly vulnerable spot. I know Jesus is right here, yet around certain people I am vulnerable. Folks who bear a particular strong resemblance to those who put me down in high school are surefire candidates to give me a spiritual coronary occlusion.
Sometimes, the answer is a change in diet that will mean consuming what is less likely to clog me up and more likely to open me up to what Jesus understood to be the fortunate life. Approaching retirement, I find that years of a steady diet of our culture have left me measuring myself by productivity, career track, and "bigger is better" even when I must downsize. I look forward to sharing my hard-earned wisdom with others when perhaps what I need to consider is that God may have more in store for me in the learning department. I suspect that a change of diet may be required here if I am to receive the blessings that God has for me in the years to come.
The most radical and invasive procedure to address heart issues is bypass surgery. This involves the transplantation of healthy veins from some area in the body to the heart. Woe to you who are rich, you may require hospitalization and your chest cut open. Blessed are you when your body is well enough that it builds a network around the problem. Blessed are you when you have found the vulnerable place and a stent can be in inserted to help you at the vulnerable place. Blessed are you when they can deal with this through monitoring and disciplining your diet. Woe to you when you have let things go so far that you require invasive surgery.
Application
The consideration of these texts brings us to the close of the season of Epiphany. Next week, the liturgical calendar will sweep us into the events of the Transfiguration. The three texts for this Sunday invite me to that place where I experience the revelation of God, concerning how I live my life. Lord knows that our society has invested all sorts of effort in trying to discern which way the wind is blowing. Any casual user of the internet or viewer of television or listener to the radio, cannot finish the day without being aware of the latest economic indicators, the most recent poll results, or what is hot and what is not.
Jeremiah calls us to consider how we discern which way the wind is blowing. I have a sneaking suspicion that our methods of discernment may be seriously flawed. I look back over the last few years and wonder who among us has been able to adequately predict where we as a nation and a planet have found ourselves. Jeremiah clearly ran into some problems as the result of his discernment, and the message he preached. Given the failure of many of our methods of discernment, maybe we should pay attention to what Jeremiah is saying and what weather vane he uses.
It is very interesting that from the very first there were those in the early church who set aside or minimized the meaning of the resurrection. This suggests to me that human difficulty with the resurrection predates the enlightenment and it rationalism. No doubt there may be many understandings of what the resurrection can mean. Paul, I believe, is saying to us that if I cannot say that Jesus is raised and know what I mean by that, my faith is in vain.
The well-being of my soul has much to do with whether the veins to my heart are clear and functioning. As the years go by, I have come to terms with Jesus' counter-cultural and counter-intuitive preaching. As the years pass, I must consider what is blocking me from acting on what I know to be true.
Alternative Application
Jeremiah 17:5-10. There is much in these texts that bother me. I don't like Jeremiah saying, "Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals." I am extremely uncomfortable with Paul implying I am still in my sins if I cannot join in the full-throated chorus of those who can say that Christ has been raised from the dead. Should this be viewed from the problem of sin or just of intellects that have been dimmed by the hyper- rationalism of our age? I wish that Luke had just used Matthew's approach of "all blessing -- no woes" in Jesus' words.
However, these texts do not invite me to minimize the tension but to live in its midst. For all our obsessing about the signs of the times we may have missed the most important if we cannot read Jeremiah adequately. We do not like it, but our inability to come to terms with the resurrection may indeed have left us in a dead-end world. I may not like Jesus' words in Luke but without coming to terms with what is really a blest life, I am left in a sea of woes.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 1
This psalm could have been written yesterday! It is striking in its contemporaneous feel. Think about it. Today the airwaves are full of those who would offer advice. From familiar newspaper advice columns to the proliferation of so-called professionals who offer advice on everything from dating to careers to investing and back again, everyone wants to get in on the act. Moreover, the media and its corporate handlers offer the seductive sinner's path to anyone who is willing to take the hike. Violence is chic, infidelity is standard, and religion is a joke. The "scoffer's seat" is held up as an ideal place to be in this day of cynical derision and near universal lack of trust. It is a desolate and joyless landscape, indeed.
Thus it is that this psalm offers a way out. Those who refuse the addled advice of commerce driven talking heads are more likely to find happiness. Those who resist the manifold temptations to walk the paths that sinners tread, similarly have access to happiness.
And the scoffers? How can there be joy in the process of tearing down others? How can there be happiness in positioning oneself as an adversary to anything and everyone that comes along with a new idea or a creative option? Cynicism may be trendy, but it is devoid of happiness except for a sneering kind of schadenfreude that is best left on the shelf next to the latest tabloid.
Real happiness comes in the clarity that emerges from a community of faith that is rooted in God. Like a tree next to a river, such a people do not thirst or grow weary. Instead, as nourished and connected people, they grow and flourish in the ways of trust, hope, and new beginnings.
Creating such communities within our churches is one of the most critical callings of the church today. In a world of vaunted and narcissistic individualism, the caring voice of community beckons. In a time when noble and good efforts are ridiculed as silly and useless in the so-called "real world," the idealism of Christian community stands as an island in the storm. And, in the midst of a runaway, consumerist culture where feelings and instincts are numbed by the ever-present pressure to acquire more and more, God's yearning reaches out to awaken us.
Yes, indeed. This psalm could have been written yesterday. Perhaps, today a new psalm might emerge celebrating the joy of those who have staked their claim in loving, authentic Christian community.
